John's Blog

Having spent most of my teaching career berating Wikipedia in front of my students, it was interesting to take a closer look at how they are put together and modified. I checked out a couple of discussion pages and was surprised at how aggressively people advocated for their ideas. While looking at Wikipedia, I had the idea to set up a wiki for my family to enter genealogical information into. I’ve set it up and will forward it to the more tech-savvy members of my family and see where we can get with it (in my ample spare time, of course). I think that it will take a while to wrap my head around how to enter information into my wiki, but with practice I am sure that it will become easier.

I found the Moodle activities to be quite straightforward, once I figured out that the shells had already been created. That meant that I could skip steps 3-8 in the “Create you basic Moodle site” instructions. It did not take much time to get my welcome page and discussion forum set up. The icebreaker activity worked well, I can see a real use for the discussion forum with my students. What was challenging was that I decided to try to set up a site for my Français Langue 8 students, but the program’s spell checker did not like my writing in French. I was surprised later to find that not only can I set the language to French, I can also force my students to use French when they use the site! I can’t even do that in my own classroom!! Needless to say, this makes me quite happy.  Bravo Moodle.

This is my inaugural post on my blog.